Gamifying PD is better for teacher engagement, participation

Allowing teachers to pursue their personal passions also creates a greater sense of job satisfaction, which may help with long-term retention.

Teachers also benefit from a variety of platforms through which they can pursue their advancement. Some teachers might prefer online options, such as webinars based on their interests and needs, while others could prefer working in small teacher-directed groups where they can collaborate with peers who have similar growth interests in person.

Professional development should also include a personal component that is relevant and effective. Data identifies teachers’ areas of weakness so administrators can work with them to set goals to make improvements.

In my state of Virginia (like many other states), we focus on these four:

Content knowledge

Workplace skills

Community engagement and civic responsibility

Career exploration

STEP 2: Tag team with colleagues to plan instruction

In step one we created our graduate profile by brainstorming and identifying both the personal and professional knowledge and skills that our future graduates need. Now it’s time to formulate plans to bring the profile to fruition. To ensure student success, implementation should take place in the classroom and tap the expertise of our colleagues.

Student success is never due to one teacher, but a collaborative effort.

STEP 3: Identify and leverage the right industry partners

Technological literacy requires students to create authentic products using appropriate edtech, therefore developing technologically literate graduates should not be left entirely to teachers and schools.

Soliciting the help of our industry and business partners is so crucial to this process

Step 4: Create career pathways in schools

schools create systemic K-12 career pathways — or pipelines — for their students and give teachers ample time and space to plan and work together to maximize the learning aligned to well-developed graduate profiles.

Although school security has grown into a $2.7 billion market — an estimate that does not account for the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — little research has been done on which safety measures do and do not protect students from gun violence. Earlier this fall, The Washington Post sent surveys to every school in its database that had endured a shooting of some kind since the 2012 killings of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., which prompted a surge of security spending by districts across the country.

In 2016, Utah’s Union Middle School had a surveillance system, external doors that could be accessed only with IDs and an armed policewoman, known as a resource officer, when a 14-year-old boy shot another student twice in the head during a confrontation outside the building just after classes ended.

“Even if we would have had metal detectors, it would not have mattered,” wrote Jeffrey P. Haney, district spokesman. “If we would have had armed guards at the entrance of the school, it would not have mattered. If we would have required students to have see-through backpacks and bags, it would not have mattered.”

The survey responses are consistent with a federally funded 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University that concluded there was “limited and conflicting evidence in the literature on the short- and long-term effectiveness of school safety technology.”

Much of what can be done to prevent harm is beyond any school’s control because, in a country with more guns — nearly 400 million — than people, children are at risk of being shot no matter where they are. A 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by gunfire lived in the United States.

The solution, Goudreau concluded, was to embed former Special Operations agents, posing as teachers, inside schools. He argued that the benefits over resource officers were obvious.